Hand drawn pencil map of Michigan I completed over the course of the past year. The map contains over 130 cities and 129 lighthouses. Size is 16x20in (406x508mm).

I'm currently in Kenya, which drives on the left, but I'm originally from Germany where we drive on the right. The switch always throws me off for the first few days. Got me wondering what the full global picture looks like.

Turns out only about 54 out of 195 countries drive on the left, mostly former British colonies plus a few others like Japan and Thailand.

Sources: World Bank, CIA World Factbook, UN, Natural Earth (map geometry)

Tools: Python (matplotlib, geopandas)

Did I get any of these wrong? Would love corrections if so, some of the smaller countries were tricky to verify.

During my check of the shipping on the outlet of the straight, I noticed a large amassing of Chinese fishing vessels in the Arabian sea. A little research shows this is a government back fishing fleet and they are developing a strategy to further the aims of the CCP in the Arabian sea. I found this very interesting and wanted to share.

https://www.eurasiantimes.com/chinese-fishing-research-vessels-map-the/

This map (United States) is from The People's Atlas by John Lothian from 1848

Here's a zoomable hi res version and my source

This map shows the historical extent of the Rhaeto-Romance linguistic continuum (roughly 6th–15th centuries) compared to its modern remnants.

Today, this group survives in three main forms:

• Romansch (Switzerland)
• Ladin (Dolomites)
• Friulian (northeastern Italy)

However, linguistic and historical evidence suggests that these were once part of a much broader and more continuous language speaking area across the Alpine region and into the northeastern Adriatic.

Over time, this continuum fragmented due to the expansion of Germanic and Slavic languages, as well as the growing influence of Venetian in the Adriatic area.

What we see today are the surviving “islands” of what was once a much larger Romance linguistic space.

Maximum temperature for March 21, 2026 ranked against the last 30 years (1997–present).
Red = hottest year (rank 1), blue = coldest (rank 30).

On March 21, 2026, almost the entire U.S. is running at or near its hottest observed maximum temperature for this date in the 30-year record. The signal is widespread across the Plains, Midwest, South, and much of the East, with only small pockets of cooler-relative conditions in parts of the Northeast and Upper Midwest and Southern Florida.

In Croatia, by latest available data, there are over 14 thousand employees in all the cities and municipalities administrative seats, and when counting the primary subdivisions (counties), that number is over 30 thousand, in a country that now has 3,8 million population.

Croatia has 128 cities and 428 municipalities as local administrative subdivisions, of which 420 have a population under 5000, with the lowest having 171 population over 83km².

The criteria I used: At least 10k population per municipality, no more than 30 mins drive to the administrative center. Exceptions were made on some islands and in very sparsely populated areas.

Now, there are still 128 cities, organized into 104 standalone cities and 12 twin cities for a total of 116 city subdivisions. The new number of municipalities is 45 down from 428.

This gives a total of 161 subdivisions, of which:

8 have a population of under 5000,
21 between 5000 and 10000,
107 between 10000 and 25000,
25 above 25000.

minsk (belarus) , luxembourg (luxembourg(